Poetry

The Lyric Imagination.—But we must now give undivided attention to pure egoistic or lyric imagination. This, as has been said, is sufficient to vitalize all forms of poetic art save drama and the Greek epic. It would be impossible to discuss adequately here the Hebrew poets, who have produced a lyric so different in kind from all other lyrics as to stand in a class by itself. As it is equal in importance to the Great Drama of Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, we may perhaps be allowed to call it the "Great Lyric." The Great Lyric must be religious—it must, it would seem, be an outpouring of the soul, not towards man, but towards God, like that of the God-intoxicated prophets and psalmists of Scripture. Even the lyric fire of Pindar owes much to the fact that he had a childlike belief in the myths to which so many of his contemporaries had begun to give a languid assent. But there is nothing in Pindar, or indeed elsewhere in Greek poetry, like the rapturous song, combining unconscious power with uncon scious grace, which we have called the Great Lyric. It might perhaps he said indeed that the Great Lyric is purely Hebrew.

But, although we could hardly expect to rind it among those whose language, complex of syntax and alive with self-conscious inflexions, bespeaks the scientific knowingness of the Western mind, to call the temper of the Great Lyric broadly "Asiatic" would be rash. It seems to belong as a birthright to those de scendants of Shem, who, yearning always to look straight into the face of God and live, could (when the Great Lyric was sung) see not much else.

Though two of the artistic elements of the Great Lyric, uncon sciousness and power, are no doubt plentiful enough in India, the element of grace is lacking for the most part. The Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemotional, as compared with Semitic hymns. And as to the Persians, they, it would seem, have the grace always, the power often, but the unconsciousness al most never. This is inevitable if we consider for a moment the chief characteristic of the Persian imagination—an imagination whose wings are not so much "bright with beauty" as heavy with it—heavy as the wings of a golden pheasant—steeped in beauty like the "tiger-moth's deep damasked wings." Now beauty of this kind does not go to the making of the Great Lyric.

Then there comes that poetry which, being ethnologically Semitic, might be supposed to exhibit something at least of the Hebrew temper—the Arabian. But, whatever may be said of the oldest Arabic poetry, with its deep sense of fate and pain, it would seem that nothing can be more unlike than the Hebrew temper and the Arabian temper as seen in later poets. It is not with Hebrew but with Persian poetry that Arabian poetry can be usefully compared. If the wings of the Persian imagination are heavy with beauty, those of the later Arabian imagination are bright with beauty—brilliant as an Eastern butterfly, quick and agile as a dragon-fly or a humming-bird. To the eye of the

Persian poet the hues of the earth are (as Firdausi says of the garden of Afrasiab) "like the tapestry of the kings of Ormuz, the air is perfumed with musk, and the waters of the brooks are the essence of roses." And to the later Arabian no less than to the Persian the earth is beautiful; but it is the clear and sparkling beauty of the earth, as she "wakes up to life, greeting the Sabaean morning"; we feel the light more than the colour. But it is neither the Persian's instinct for beauty nor the Arabian's quenchless wit and exhaustless animal spirits that go to the making of the Great Lyric ; far from it. In a word, the Great Lyric, as we have said, cannot be assigned to the Asiatic temper generally any more than it can be assigned to the European temper.

The Ode.

In the poetry of Europe, if we cannot say of Pin dar, devout as he is, that he produced the Great Lyric, what can we say of any other European poet? The truth is that, like the Great Drama, so straight and so warm does it seem to come from the heart of man in its highest moods that we scarcely feel it to be literature at all. Passing, however, from this supreme expression of lyrical imagination, we come to the artistic code. Whatever may have been said to the contrary, enthusiasm is, in the nature of things, the very basis of the ode ; for the ode is a mono-drama, the actor in which is the poet himself ; and, as Marmontel has well pointed out, if the actor in the mono-drama is not affected by the sentiments he expresses, the ode must be cold and lifeless. But, although the ode is a natural poetic method of the poet considered as a prophet—although it is the voice of poetry as a fine frenzy—it must not be supposed that there is anything lawless in its structure. "Pindar," says the Italian critic, Gravina, "launches his verses upon the bosom of the sea; he spreads out all his sails; he confronts the tempest and the rocks ; the waves arise and are ready to engulf him; already he has disappeared from the spectator's view; when sud denly he springs up in the midst of the waters and reaches happily the shore." Now it is this Pindaric discursiveness, this Pindaric unrestraint as to the matter, which has led poets to attempt to imitate him by adopting an unrestraint as to form. Although no two odes of Pindar exhibit the same metrical structure (the Aeolian and Lydian rhythms being mingled with the Doric in different proportions), yet each ode is in itself obedient, severely obedient, to structural law. This we feel; but what the law is exactly no metricist has perhaps ever yet been able to explain.